Qt/Embedded

David Johnson david at usermode.org
Mon Nov 13 05:40:10 UTC 2000


When Trolltech announced that they were offering their Qt/Embedded product 
under the GPL, I initially assumed that it would be a dual GPL/QPL license 
just like Qt/X11. I was wrong. It is only under the GPL and their proprietary 
license.

This brings up an interesting quandery. There are lots of non-GPL 
applications that use Qt. What will their relationship with Qt/Embedded be? 
On one hand the GPL dictates the license of all applications that reference 
the library's interface. On the other hand, the interface for for Qt/Embedded 
is nearly identical to Qt/X11, so that many programs can be ported with a few 
#ifdefs and a recompile.

Will a BSD or MIT application even be able to use these #ifdefs so that the 
end user can recompile in private? Will embedded platforms be off limits to 
these applications? For GPL authors, this is a non-issue, but for the rest of 
us its frustrating (imagine the next version of GTK+ being under the GPL 
license and you're a Mozilla developer).

-- 
David Johnson
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http://www.usermode.org



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